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Last night, the upcoming Hack Hospitality hackathon (taking place in St. Pete at Station House and The Iron Yard from Friday, August 25 through Sunday, August 27) held an info session where they covered the details. For the benefit of those of you who couldn’t make it, here are the slides that organizer Trey Steinhoff put together.

Hack Hospitality is organized by Startup Tampa Bay, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Ryan Sullivan, Gracie Stemmer, and Trey Steinhoff and whose mission is to empower entrepreneurs and inspire the next generation of leaders in Tampa Bay. They help organize a number of events here in Tampa Bay, including Startup Weekend, Startup Week, and Startup Social.

Why hack hospitality?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Leisure and Hospitality category accounts for 154,000 jobs in Tampa/St. Pete/Clearwater, which is about 12% of total non-farm wage and salary employment in the area. Tourism in the area — buoyed by having two of the best beaches in the U.S. (Clearwater Beach and St. Pete Beach) — helps drive our local hospitality industry, as does Tampa Bay being the home of hospitality powerhouses including national ones like Bloomin’ Brands (Outback Steakhouse) and local ones like Ciccio Restaurant Group.

The hospitality industry doesn’t always make use of the latest technology, and the technology they use often comes from a mish-mash of vendors and often doesn’t connect well. They also don’t have much exposure to the tech industry, and Hack Hospitality aims to fix that by bringing the two groups together to create practical, useful, and usable solutions for hospitality.

The hackathon will feature people from the hospitality industry, who’ll present challenges that teams can try to solve. They’ll also be available during the hackathon so that participants can ask the questions and make use of their domain expertise.

This is a developer-focused hackathon. The goal isn’t to come up with the best pitch or most viable business idea or business model; it’s to create code that people working in some part of the hospitality industry will find useful.

The schedule, rules, and code of conduct

The hackathon will take place over the weekend starting Friday, August 25th. Here’s the schedule:

Here are Hack Hospitality’s rules:

1. There is no maximum or minimum team size.
2. All team members should be present at the event. Leaving the venue for some time to hack elsewhere is fine.
3. Teams can get advice from organizers, volunteers, sponsors, and others.
4. All work on a project should be done at the hackathon.
5. Teams can use an idea they had before the event, but they can’t work on its implementation before the event.
6. Teams can work on ideas that have already been done. Hacks do not have to be original. You will be judged on the quality of that hack.
7. Teams can work on an idea that they have worked on before (as long as they do not re-use code).
8. Teams can use libraries, frameworks, or open-source code in their projects. Working on a project before the event and open-sourcing it for the sole purpose of using the code during the event is against the spirit of the rules and is not allowed.
9. Adding new features to existing projects is allowed. Judges will only consider new functionality added during the hackathon.
10. Teams must stop hacking once the time is up. However, teams are allowed to debug and make small fixes to their programs after time is up. Making large changes or adding new features is not allowed.
11. All projects remain the intellectual property of individuals or teams that created them.
12. By participating in the hackathon, you represent and warrant that you are the sole author and copyright owner of the project, and that the project is an original work of the team, or if the project is a work based on an existing code, that the you have acquired sufficient rights to use and to authorize others; and that the project does not infringe upon any copyright or upon any other third party rights of which you are aware, and that the project is free of malware.
13. Projects that violate the Code of Conduct are not allowed.
14. Teams can be disqualified from the competition at the organizers’ discretion. Reasons might include but are not limited to breaking the Competition Rules, breaking the Code of Conduct, or other unsporting behavior.

And here are the judging criteria:

1. Demo > Pitch. You are not judged on the quality of your pitch or the quality of your idea. You are judged on the quality of your hack.
2. Technology: How technically impressive was the hack? Was the technical problem the team tackled difficult? Did it use a particularly clever technique or did it use many different components? Did the technology involved make you go “Wow”?
3. Design: Did the team put thought into the user experience? How well designed is the interface? For a website, this might be about how beautiful the CSS or graphics are. For a hardware project, it might be more about how good the human-computer interaction is (e.g. is it easy to use or does it use a cool interface?).
4. Completion: Does the hack work? Did the team achieve everything they wanted?

And finally, there’s a code of conduct, which is best summarized as “Don’t be a jerk”:

• Harassment-free experience for everyone. We do not tolerate harassment of hackathon participants in any form.
• Hackathon participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the hackathon without a refund (if applicable) at the discretion of the hackathon organizers.
• Full details will be at tampabayhackathon.com.

Prizes!

There will be a number of prizes for the solutions that are judged to be the best, including gift cards for local businesses, swag, and more to be announced as the hackathon draws closer.

Sourcetoad will provide the grand prize for the overall first place solution: $3,000 in cash! Not bad for a weekend’s work.

Sponsor organizations

Hack Hospitality is made possible through these sponsors:

Sourcetoad! They’re a great company with great people, and that’s why I now work there. We’re a tech consulting and software engineering company with offices in Tampa, Florida and Perth, Western Australia. One of our specialties is building software solutions for the cruise industry, for whom we make web, mobile, desktop, kiosk, and smart TV applications for a number of uses, ranging from in-cabin movies and TV to hotel, activity, excursion bookings — basically a lot of the behind-the-scenes software that makes a cruise-goer’s trip even better.

We’ll be there to provide our knowledge of the cruise and hotel industries, as well as access to data sets and APIs that participants might find useful for building their hospitality solutions.

Ciccio Restaurant Group are the people behind some of my favorite Tampa Bay Restaurants, including Green Lemon and Daily Eats. Among other things, they’ll provide breakfast and lunch on the Saturday.

SaltBlock Hospitality Group specialize in both catering/event production and hospitality management, and they’ll supply the meals on Sunday.

The Station House is a St. Pete institution. Part coworking space, part café/restaturant, part lounge, part yoga studio, part event space, it’s five floors of awesome in a beautiful brick building located in the heart of downtown St. Petersburg. They’re providing a beautiful, comfortable space in which to have the hackathon.

Also participating is The Iron Yard Tampa Bay, who occupy the Station House’s third floor. The Iron Yard is more than just a “bootcamp”-style coding school; it’s the social heart and soul of the St. Pete tech scene, thanks their opening their space in the evenings to the tech community for meetups and get-togethers, and their involvement in tech and civic events.

How to register for Hack Hospitality

It’s simple — go to TampaBayHackathon.com to find out more, or if you like, you can go straight to the registration page.

There’s a $20-per-person registration fee, but attendees will be provided with food, drink, and more.

This month’s project: A checklist app

Checklist apps are a mainstay — they’re popular enough for there to be a healthy number of them in the App Store, including these seven big players. At the next Tampa iOS Meetup, we’ll build a simple version that lets users add or remove items from a “to-do” style list, mark or unmark them as complete, and edit the details of any item in the list. Along the way, we’ll cover such items as:

•  Table Views, the UI elements that provide viewers with a visual list
• Segues, which move the user from one “screen” to another
• Classes, and how to use them in object-oriented programming

Bring your MacBook, because this is a hands-on programming exercise! You’ll get provide a “starter” project that you’ll work on as Joey walks you through the process of building a basic checklist app. By the end of this session, you’ll have a working checklist/to-do list app that you can use as a jumping-off point to create your own list-style applications for the iPhone or iPad.

New location

Tampa iOS Meetup had a new location: the offices of Joey’s new employer, Sourcetoad, who are located in Carrollwood on Busch just east of Dale Mabry. It’ll be the home of Tampa iOS Meetup from now on. It’s located in Twin Lakes Office Park, and the map below should make it a little easier to find Sourcetoad in the complex (we’re in unit #1018):

Also…

There will be food and drink — I’m aiming for pizza, for both carnivores and vegetarians.

As we move to our new location, we’d like to thank Wolters Kluwer and John Wang for being Tampa iOS Meetup’s home for the past year. Your hospitality is greatly appreciated!

The details, and how to register for this meetup

• When: Tuesday, August 1st, 2017 at 6:30 p.m.
• Where: Sourcetoad’s office — 2901 West Busch Boulevard, Suite 1018 (see map above)
• How to register: If you’d like to attend this meetup, please register on the Meetup page.

So what’s Tampa iOS Meetup about, anyway?

Tampa iOS Meetup is the Tampa Bay area’s meetup for beginning programmers and developers new to iOS development. We take a hands-on approach because it’s our answer to a question that I’ve been asked again and again, and it goes something like this:

“I’ve been studying iOS development for some time, and I’m still having a problem writing apps. I know how to program specific features in iOS, but I don’t know how to turn a bunch of features into an app.”

It’s one thing to go through tutorials that show you how to program a specific feature. It’s a completely different thing to take the knowledge from those tutorials and then write an app. My goal for Tampa iOS Meetup in 2017 is to show you how to make that leap by walking you through the process of making apps.

If you’re in the Tampa Bay area and you’ve always wanted to learn iOS development but needed some help getting started, Tampa iOS Meetup is for you! It’s a regular gathering aimed at people new to iOS development or software development in general where we cover all sorts of programming topics as we build applications together in a casual, fun, hands-on setting. Find out more at the Tampa iOS Meetup page.

Yours Truly, dressed for software product management success!

Day one of the new job at Sourcetoad started with me going to the gym, heading home, showering, and then getting appropriately dressed, as pictured above.

Then it was off to the new office, whose exterior looks like this:

The view from near Sourcetoad’s future front door (we’re expanding into another office).

The side of Sourcetoad’s building.

The view from near Sourcetoad’s front door (soon to be its back door, as we’re expanding the office).

The office is biking distance from home, but I’ll be driving to work for the next little while. That’s because from June to September, Tampa gets afternoon tropical storms with lots of lightning (Tampa’s the lightning capital of North America), and during those times, a bike a basically a lightning rod that you sit on.

In addition to being my first day at Sourcetoad, it was also the first day for our new mural. Local artists Rebekah Lazaridis and Meaghan Scalise came by in the morning to paint the work.

I got only a momentary glimpse of the artists in action, as I was busy wrangling my new provisions:

Click the photo to see it at full size.

As is tradition when one is on their first day at a workplace with a more startup-like feel, I’m posting a photo of the stuff that’s been assigned to me by Sourcetoad. Among them are:

• 15-inch Macbook Pro. It’s my first new-school Macbook with the Touch Bar and incompatible-with-everything-I-own USB-C ports. But it is a delightfully lean, mean, senior product management machine! The company-provided spare power adapter is a nice bonus.
• Not one, but two additional monitors! This is the first workplace to provide such a perk.
• Sourcetoad water bottle. I’m a regular gym-goer and cyclist (I plan to bike to work when it’s not thunderstorm season), so I can never have too many good water bottles.
• Sourcetoad-branded “Field Notes”-style notebook and mechanical pencil. Because there are times when electronics will fail you.

I spent the morning getting my laptop and various accounts set up, followed by lunch with CEO Greg Ross-Munro and Director of Operations Deborah Neff, most of the afternoon getting briefed on software projects by Director of Projects Nick DeMelas, and the end of the day having a beer with the Sourcetoad crew in the break room. I’m pretty pleased with how Day One went.

It’s Monday, July 24th, 2017, which means that’s it’s Day One at the new job at Sourcetoad, a Tampa-based software development shop that makes all sort of interesting software products, including:

I will be managing the above products, as my role is Lead Product Manager, which means that I may need to add these T-shirts to my wardrobe:

All kidding aside, you might be asking “Really, what does a product manager do?”

My favorite definition comes from Marty Cagan’s book, Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love:

In Inspired, Cagan cleverly summarizes the product manager’s mission as:

to discover a product that is valuable, usable and feasible.

The Accidental Product Manager breaks down product management into these 5 steps:

• Identify A Need: Your product will never be a success if it doesn’t solve a problem for a customer. Before you spend any time creating product, first take the time to find a customer need that they’d be willing to spend money to solve.
• Identify Customers: The world is filled with lots of customer problems that nobody would actually pay to solve. The dot.com implosion showed that it was easy to create a product that solved a problem that nobody really needed to have solved (remember Pets.com?)
• Create Product: Product managers can get lost in this part of the program. The product that gets created needs to solve the problem better than anyone else for the customers who are willing to pay for it. That’s it.
• Sell Product: Having a product is a good start, but it’s not going to do anyone any good unless you can make your customers aware of it. Once they know that it exists, you are going to have to work with the rest of your company to find ways to get your product into your customer’s hands.
• Support Product: There is an old phrase that says that its 5x easier to sell to an existing customer than to a new one. The only way that that is going to be true is if your existing customer is happy with you. Supporting the product once it’s been bought is not nearly as glamorous as a new sale, but it can be the key to future sales.

You’ve probably seen this Venn diagram in a number of presentations about product management:

Martin Eriksson summed up the three sets that make up the Venn diagram quite nicely:

• Business – Product Management is above all else a business function, focused on maximising business value from a product. Product Managers should be obsessed with optimising a product to achieve the business goals while maximising return on investment. Sorry, this does mean that you are a suit – but you don’t have to wear one.
• Technology – There’s no point defining what to build if you don’t know how it will get built. This doesn’t mean a Product Manager needs to be able to sit down and code but understanding the technology stack and most importantly understanding the level of effort involved is crucial to making the right decisions. This is even more important in an Agile world where Product Managers spend more time day to day with the development team than with anyone else inside the business.
• User Experience – Last but not least the Product Manager is the voice of the user inside the business and must be passionate about the user experience. Again this doesn’t mean being a pixel pusher but you do need to be out there testing the product, talking to users and getting that feedback first hand – especially in a start-up.

The classic X-Men issue where Professor X meets the Shadow King.

Mine is a critical position within the company, and you may wonder if it scares me. Like the management who hired me, I have great confidence in my abilities, but as Professor Charles Xavier once astutely said before one of the greatest battles in his life: Only a fool is without fear.

I’m looking forward to Day One at Sourcetoad and a new adventure!

Other articles I’ve written about the new job

• The job search is over: I’ve joined Sourcetoad!
• (Almost) everything I did between losing my last job and landing my new one